I now knew that those that came naturally to me were never spells at all. It was the power of Diabolus. I was speaking it into being and it was. Just like the words I’d said to Annabelle just now. The small girl in the attic was gone. She’d not be back. She was free of a home where sadness had held her. There was no more clinging to this life for her now. The Latin I spoke was simply me drawing on my father’s power and speaking it be.

The front door opened and my mother stepped out, her eyes locked on me.

“Get away from this place!” she yelled out to me.

“Gladly,” I replied. “But, mother, the spell you’ve placed around this house to keep me away,” I said to her, sensing its presence there, then vanishing from her yard and reappearing inches from her on the front porch.

She screamed and began tossing hexes that couldn’t touch me.

“I have no desire to come here or see you. I had some unfinished business. I won’t be back. You were right to send me away. I shouldn’t have been born and I belong nowhere.” Those were words I needed to say to her. Closure for us. Closure for me.

“You’re just like him. I knew you were. I saw it when you were little,” her voice was nervous and accustory as if I had asked for this. She’d wanted the third daughter so badly she made a deal with the Devil. I was the result. I didn’t need to stay and be reminded of the mistake she wished she’d never made.

I could lie to myself but the truth was that it hurt. To have a mother who didn’t just not like you, but hated you. A mother who wished you were never born. She’d done this. I didn’t want to feel anything toward her or the rest of the Kamlocks. She’d allowed me to believe a lie all my life. Now, Lucas Delvaux was just one more loss in this nightmare that was my life.

Turning away from the terror in Peresephone’s eyes, I didn’t let her see the pain in mine. It was my secret. No one had to know the anguish I faced every day when I opened my eyes. I would survive. I wouldn’t be happy, but I’d live.

I took the last steps I would ever take down the porch steps of my former home and didn’t look back. This time I was really leaving. She didn’t have to see me again. I didn’t need that reminder. My life with her would become a closed chapter. Never to be reopened.